Like many, I check review sites when making bookings at hotels or on airlines. I realise that some will be fake and so I always lop off the best and worst, assuming that the rest will give a reasonable indication of the experience I will find.

London's top-rated restaurant is a total fake!

But how does a non-existent restaurant both get into TripAdvisor in the first place starting at the bottom of the list of all restaurants in London and then rise not just into the first half- but to the position of No. 1? A fake restaurant, fake photos, clever marketing and thousands of fake reviews. This will make you think twice before trusting reviews!!

I do the same as you except sometimes the restaurant may have nothing but very positive reviews. I look at who the reviewer was and how many reviews they have submitted and how long they have been a member.

I'm quite sure a cursory reading of the restaurant you did not name would have scared me off because of who the reviewers were. In addition there are many other restaurant review sites which you can compare the ratings.

I have to say in general Trip Advisor has allowed me to find multiple restaurants in multiple countries and cities that I never would have found on my own.

Just recently I found restaurants in S Africa and Poland for all breakfast lunch and dinner that were all superb and unlikely I would have ever found them without Trip Advisor. So I will happily keep using them and posting my reviews!

I agree with you. I have found some very good hotels and restaurants as a result of checking with Tripadvisor and will continue to write and check reviews. The restaurant in the article is named The Shed at Dulwich. It was a deliberate prank to try and outwit Tripadvisor's system of checks and balances - and did so spectacularly! The caveat has to be, though, that it is well known in the travel business and has been written about in many magazines that quite a number of TripAdvisor reviews are in fact fake. Usually these are quite obvious - rave two-liners with no actual detail from someone who has made no other reviews. These are definitely the ones to avoid.

Another way of filtering them is by looking to see how many reviews a person's done, too. Someone with three that are extreme (either way) doesn't carry as much weight with me as someone with, say, 20 relatively balanced ones.

I agree with all the useful tips given above. But I still treat many reviews with more than a degree of suspicion. I wrote before on another site of a stay at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore in 2011 which for me was pretty ghastly. So many issues were wrong I would never dream of staying again (US$24 per day for internet use? Ridiculous!) It was then at around #64 in the list of Singapore hotels on TripAdvisor, the lowest of any 5-star hotel in the city. But the MBS is the city's iconic flagship hotel and the city indirectly pumped cash into it. Languishing at the bottom was unacceptable. Within a year it had risen to about #40 and was soon in the low #30s. I read almost every single review since my stay. There were so many obvious fakes I wrote to TripAdvisor in the US drawing its attention to 18 of them. 12 soon disappeared. (So, why did their in-house checking systems not get there first, I always wondered?). I get some comfort from the fact that it has now dropped again and is lodged at #40. Even so, it still has those first - fifth time contributors writing garbage like "Everything was perfect" and "Experience of a lifetime"!

It's important to realise I think that there is a serious business logic behind TripAdvisor - and it not just the satisfaction of reviewers seeing their comments on screen.

A study by Cornell University’s Center for Hospitality Research found that for every percentage point a hotel improves its online reputation, its “RevPAR” (revenue per available room) goes up by 1.4 percent; for every point its reputation improves on a five-point scale, a hotel can raise prices by 11 percent without seeing bookings fall off. This has been a boon for smaller, midpriced, independently owned hotels. “Twenty years ago, the brands owned the sense of quality,” says Bjorn Hanson, a professor at New York University’s Tisch Center for Hospitality and Tourism. “If I stayed at a big-name hotel, I knew what I was getting.” That sense of confidence in quality, argues Hanson, has been supplanted by TripAdvisor. Not only can there be variation within a brand, but suddenly that quirky hotel that was once the obscure favorite of a single guidebook gets lifted to market prominence. Thanks to TripAdvisor, a formerly sleepy spot like the Magic Castle Hotel in Los Angeles—ranked number one in the city—is, says Hanson, “able to generate rates and occupancy levels that from a hotel-analyst point of view are quite extraordinary.”

I consider it a big difference between Hotels and Restaurants or other reviews on Trip Advisor.

I rarely waste my time looking at Hotels on Trip Advisor since like FH i Have had some mediocre stays on highly recommended Hotels. Not to say I have not had a few good finds but since I am a Diamond with Hilton and lots of Marriott points I rarely waste my time looking at Hotel Reviews any longer . Truth is I rarely use Hotels anymore since Airbnb is my first choice for stays of 2 nights or longer and I find those reviews completely reliable.

If I was looking for a Hotel in a place I did not know , I would first go to Booking.com for reviews since it is impossible to game their system. You have to pay and check out before being allowed to post a review.

firecat69 wrote:If I was looking for a Hotel in a place I did not know , I would first go to Booking.com for reviews since it is impossible to game their system. You have to pay and check out before being allowed to post a review.

Good point, and I believe the same is true on sites like agoda and hotels.com. They only accept reviews from customers who have booked through their own sites. My hotel points, like airline miles, have mostly been spent and so I do need to check on quality and prices. I have not used airbnb yet other than to survey apartments available in Taipei. Unfortunately what is on offer is not to my taste, other than a very small one but at a price that is exactly the same price as the hotel I now use - and they are in virtually the same location.

The obvious problem with most reviews is that those reviewing have a very wide range of experience and expectations. What I like, firecat and others might loathe and vice versa. So a decent handful of salt is always needed!

What you say about Hotel bookings is absolutely true. The review may reflect the room they got, who was on the desk at check in etc etc etc . Or if a chain , many times a reviewer night be treated better because of his Level of membership and not necessarily mention that. In lots of ways it can be a crap shoot.

Too bad Airbnb does not have apartments you like in Taiwan. I went back and looked at my Airbnb bookings . 65 Bookings in 32 countries and only once did I receive something that I had not expected. But I never rent an apartment with no reviews and try not to rent from agents and only the actual owners.

I believe TripAdvisor would be well advised to adopt the policy now universal on Skytrax. The airline review site will only include reviews if you send a copy of the boarding pass as proof of having taken the flight being reviewed. Scanning and attaching the final page of a hotel bill would ensure the reviewer had actually stayed.